PRISONER

Washington Post opinion writer and CNN
contributor Rezaian recounts his 544 days of imprisonment at the hands of the
Iranian regime.

A native of Iran whose family had immigrated to the United
States decades earlier, the author moved to Tehran to head the Washington
Post bureau there. It was a good gig, well paid in dollars, while,
because his wife was an Iranian citizen, they were allowed to pay in local
currency. “Life was good,” he writes. Although he favored local-color stories,
often about food, and guided Anthony Bourdain through the city for an episode
of Parts Unknown (this book is published under Bourdain’s
imprint), he still managed to fall afoul of the secret police. The charge
eventually cooked up for him was definitively Orwellian: “As a member of the
American press writing what could only be perceived as neutral stories about
Iran, I was attempting to soften American public opinion toward the Islamic
Republic”—a softening that would allow American values to circulate within the
country. After developing strategies to avoid despair while in solitary
confinement (“if you’re lucky you learn to quiet your mind, just a little, and
live softly”), Rezaian could do little more than wait it out even as Iranian
agents threatened to add time to his sentence because his mother was publicly
protesting his imprisonment. “Why is your mother coordinating with the BBC to
ruin your life?” asked one. The author credits a concerted campaign on the part
of Post editor Martin Baron, his brother, and other
intermediaries for his release after having been “the plaything of some of the
nastiest authoritarian ideologues to roam the earth in many decades.” Rezaian
also allows that one of his captors got at least one thing right: He correctly
predicted the outcome of the 2016 election in the U.S., saying, “Trump is the
candidate that hates Muslims most.”

Of interest to students of the Iranian system as well as
free-press advocates.